“When the he’p gone in the evenings and folks want to fix they drinks! They ain’t going to want to fool with no old-fashioned knuckle-bruising trays” (more from the brochure). “It’s not S.E. on the other boxes.”
“S.E.?” asked the engineer.
“Standard Equipment.”
“Oh. Then you’re just going to walk up to some lady’s house at ten o’clock in the morning and ring the doorbell and when she comes to the door you’re going to ask her to let you show this ice dispenser.”
“Sho,” said David and began laughing at the sour-looking engineer, ts-ts-ts.
“Well, you’re not,” the engineer would groan. Damnation, David couldn’t even polish silver. There was always silver cream left in the grooves. Still, the engineer liked to watch him at work. The morning sunlight fell among the silver fish in the shallows. The metal was creamy and satiny. The open jar of silver cream, the clotted rag, the gritty astringent smell of it, put him in mind of something but he couldn’t say what.
But damn this awful vulnerability of theirs, he ranted, eyes fixed on the glittering silver. It’s going to ruin us all, this helplessness. Why, David acted as if everybody was going to treat him well! If I were a Negro, I’d be tougher than that. I’d be steadfast and tough as a Jew and I’d beat them. I’d never rest until I beat them and I could. I should have been born a Negro, for then my upside-downness would be right side up and I’d beat them and life would be simple.
But Oh Christ, David, this goddamn innocence, it’s going to ruin us all. You think they’re going to treat you well, you act like you’re baby brother at home. Christ, they’re not going to treat you well. They’re going to violate you and it’s going to ruin us all, you, them, us. And that’s a shame because they’re not that bad. They’re not bad. They’re better than most, in fact. But you’re going to ruin us all with your vulnerability. It’s God’s terrible vengeance upon us, Jamie said Val said, not to loose the seven plagues upon us or the Assyrian or even the Yankee, but just to leave you here among us with this fearful vulnerability to invite violation and to be violated twenty times a day, day in and day out, our lives long, like a young girl. Who would not? And so the best of us, Jamie said she said, is only good the way a rapist is good later, for a rapist can be good later and even especially good and especially happy.
But damn him, he thought, him and his crass black inept baby-brother vulnerability. Why should I, for Christ’s sake, sit here all asweat and solicitous of his vulnerability. Let him go sell his non-knuckle-bruising ice trays and if he gets hurt: well, I’m not well myself.
David’s mother, Lugurtha Ross, was cook. She was respectable and black as black, with a coppery highlight, and had a straight Indian nose. She wanted no trouble with anybody. All she wanted in the world was to find fervent areas of agreement. She spoke to you only of such things as juvenile delinquency. “Chirren don’t have any respect for their parents any more,” she would cry. “You cain’t even correck them!”— even though David was her only living child and it was impossible to imagine him as a delinquent. She made it sound as if everybody were in the same boat; if only children would have more respect, our troubles would be over. She often made beaten biscuits in the evening, and as she sifted flour on the marble and handled the mitt of dough, she sang in a high decorous deaconess voice, not spirituals but songs she made up.
Up in an airplane
Smoking her sweet cigarette
She went way up in an airplane
Smoking her sweet cigarette
John Houghton, the gardener, lived in a room under the engineer’s apartment. An ancient little Negro with dim muddy eyes and a face screwed up like a prune around a patch of bristling somewhere near the middle of which was his mustache, he was at least sixty-five and slim and quick as a boy. He had come from the deep country of south Georgia and worked on the railroad and once as a hod carrier forty years ago when they built the dam at Muscle Shoals. He had been night watchman for the construction company when Mr. Vaught built his castle. Mr. Vaught liked him and hired him. But he was still a country Negro and had country ways. Sometimes Jamie and David would get him in a card game just to see him play. The only game he knew was a strange south Georgia game called pitty-pat. You played your cards in turn and took tricks but there was not much rhyme or reason to it. When John Houghton’s turn came, he always stood up, drew back, and slapped the card down with a tremendous ha-a-a-a-umph! just as if he were swinging a sledge hammer, but pulling up at the last second and setting the card down soft as a feather. David couldn’t help laughing ts-ts-ts. “What game we gon’ play, John?” he would ask the gardener to get him to say pitty-pat. “Lessus have a game of pitty-pat,” John Houghton would say, standing up also to shuffle the cards, which he did by chocking them into each other, all the while making terrific feints and knee-bends like a boxer. “Pitty-pat,” cried David and fell out laughing. But John Houghton paid no attention and told them instead of his adventures in the city, where, if the police caught you playing cards, they would sandbag you and take you to jail.
“What do you mean, sandbag?” asked the puzzled engineer.
“That’s what I mean!” cried John Houghton. “I mean they sandbag you.”
Of an evening John Houghton would don his jacket, an oversize Marine drawstring jacket with deep patch pockets, turn the collar up around his ears so that just the top of his gnarled puckered head showed above it, thrust his hands deep into the patch pockets, and take a stroll down the service road which wound along the ridge behind the big houses. There he met the maids getting off work.
At night and sometimes all night long there arose from the room below the engineer’s the sounds of scuffling and, it seemed to him, of flight and pursuit; of a chair scraped back, a sudden scurry of feet and screams, he could have sworn more than one voice, several in fact, screams both outraged and risible as pursuer and quarry rounded the very walls, it seemed like.
They sat in the garden, the three students, on the last day of summer and leafed through their new textbooks. The whitethroat sparrows had come back early and were scratching in the sour leaves. The October sunlight was blinding on the white glazed pages, which smelled like acetate and the year ahead. The chemistry text seemed to exhale the delicate effluvium of new compounds. From the anthology there arose a subtler smell, both exotic and businesslike, of the poet’s disorder, his sweats and scribblings, and of the office order of the professor and the sweet ultimate ink. By contrast, everything else seemed untidy, the summer past, the ruined garden, one’s own life. Their best hope lay in the books themselves, the orderly march of chapter and subheading, the tables, the summaries, the index, the fine fat page of type.
The old spurious hope and elegance of school days came back to him. How strange it was that school had nothing whatever to do with life. The old talk of school as a preparation for life — what a bad joke. There was no relation at all. School made matters worse. The elegance and order of school had disarmed him for what came later.
Jamie had a queer-looking physical-chemical reference, as stubby and thick as a German handbook. Hefting it, you felt like a German: a whole body of knowledge, a Wissenschaft, here in your hand, a good chunky volume. Kitty had a great $15 atlas-size anthology of World Literature from Heraclitus to Robert Frost — the whole works. The engineer was content with a thin tight little volume, The Theory of Large Numbers, that and his slide rule, which he wore in a scabbard like a dagger. Sitting in the funky tannin smell of the fall garden, he slid the window of his rule and read off cube roots and cosigns. He for artifacts, bright pretty useful objects like slide rules, and you can have your funky gardens and jaybirds crying down October.